Herbert Spencer’s Sociology

The republication of this book is eminently i– tting at this time. Jay Rumney’s Herbert Spencer’s Sociology i– rst appeared in 1937. In that year Talcott Parsons, citing Crane Brinton, declared: Spencer is dead. But who killed him and how? It was the thesis of Parsons’ famous The Structure of Social Action that the evolution of scientii– c theory had put an end to Spencer. For more than a generation the man whose name had been synonymous with sociology was, or so it seemed, repressed and forgotten.